Teaching Resource

In the early 1960s, Mississippi was the poorest state in the nation, with most non-white families living well below the poverty line. Although African Americans made up nearly half of the state's population, few were registered to vote, and there were no African American representatives in the Democratic Party. In 1964, a presidential election year, civil rights organizations decided to focus on four goals in Mississippi: registering African Americans to vote; using the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to challenge...

Teaching Resource

The Founding Fathers created the Supreme Court in Article III of the Constitution of the United States. The most influential role of the Court, however, was defined later through the appeal process, in cases involving the laws of state and local legislatures and Congress. Landmark cases such as Marbury v. Madison, McCulloch v. Maryland, and others, which were decided in the first decades of the nineteenth century, established the court’s power of judicial review. This gave the appointed...

Teaching Resource

The Fourteenth Amendment was ratified in 1868, during the congressional Reconstruction era. The amendment’s most significant provision—“No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”—created the potential for two interpretations. It seemed to some that Congress...

Teaching Resource

Teaching Resource

In 1932, times were hard for many as jobs were not easy to find and people had difficulty putting food on the table. In March of that year, nine black boys ventured out looking for work only to find themselves caught in a series of events that would drastically change their lives. They hopped on a train car where they ran into some white boys also in search of jobs. After getting in a fight, the black boys eventually found themselves charged with raping two white women who were also on the train but in a different car....